Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 26

Jim wasn't ugly at all, I discovered. Faces are like poems – the longer they take to puzzle out, the better, and Jim's was ungettable. It grew in power and meaning every day I knew him. How did the eyebrows rhyme with the mouth? How did the nose get to the cheek? Men with incoherent faces very often have beautiful hands (as a rule, the reverse applies too – either the hands or the face must be more beautiful, and you rarely get the two together). And Jim had sensationally beautiful hands. The tiny network of cracks in the webbing between his fingers was always grouted with pale skin-dust. They were highly coloured like the flank of a rainbow trout, pink and blue stippled, and had the unconscious elegance of Donald Sutherland's – the Gold Standard of manual beauty (incoherent face – see?). And the hands did beautiful things. What was sarcasm in Jim's mouth was softened to wit in his fingers. Using all five fingers of his left hand simultaneously as bookmarks for different pages of the paper, he would tear articles out in right angles with his other hand. He would seem to describe a simple expressive gesture in the air, and the four locks on his front door would fall open. Oh, beautiful dexterity! James Dean was a show-off with his hands, which were the most muscular parts of him. That's why people couldn't stop taking photographs of him – he was always grabbing attention by fiddling with some prop (bongos, a recorder, a cape, a camera). He was a prestidigitator. A hand magician – that very boyish accomplishment. The early turning point of Rebel Without a Cause is Dean dexterously snatching Buzz's knife in mid-air and there is always the bit in Giant when he's under pressure to sell the land he's inherited on Rock Hudson's ranch.

He's playing with a rope and leaning back in his chair, not focused on the other people in the room. Playing with the rope implies: I was happiest in the company of myself as a child. He keeps on playing with the rope, and gets up and walks to the door, still playing, then he flicks it and it forms a knot in mid-air. And although it seems a kind of corrupt, even irrelevant thing to do, so obviously a scene-stealing gesture, you can't help but think: Jesus, that must be acting. Or magic. (In the next scene Dean's showing off with his hands again as he sits on the platform of an oil tower, complicatedly putting one hand down between his legs to take all his weight, then transferring the weight to the other hand – like a monkey, little feet, massive sternum, or a gymnast on the rings, with the shakiness of a flower in time lapse. It's not fluent or graceful – it looks like he's demonstrating the resistance of the air, that oppressive weight Dean always seemed to be bowed under. And which his hair strove up against. Hair which looks like a cartoon of dreams of a better world rising from a head.)